


That One Frozen Second

by fourteenlines



Series: CJ & Toby Not Sleeping Together [1]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22261447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines
Summary: He's New York, and she's LA, and it never would have worked anyway.
Relationships: C. J. Cregg/Toby Ziegler
Series: CJ & Toby Not Sleeping Together [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1602727
Kudos: 21





	That One Frozen Second

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Retina Burn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/100352) by [august_the_real](https://archiveofourown.org/users/august_the_real/pseuds/august_the_real), [pene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pene/pseuds/pene). 



> Originally posted circa 2002. Nowhere near as good as "Retina Burn," but that's what I wanted it to be. Please give me ALL the CJ/Toby origin stories, my pretties.
> 
> I wrote a description of the events of this story in another piece titled "Suspended Animation," so I guess you could call it a series.

_BILLY: If we're going to banter like this, give me a little time. It's been nine years, I'm rusty._

__

HANNAH: You'll pick it right up again, it's like French. You see, that's what I would miss if I left New York. The bantering."

__

_BILLY: San Francisco's only an hour away. We go up there and banter in emergencies._

Neil Simon, "California Suite"

+++

The back of the cab is cramped and she wishes she hadn't worn these heels. She's unused to riding in a cab, because it's been a long time since she's been this drunk, and everyone drives everywhere in LA. He seems to find this hard to fathom, but that's never been one of the things they argue about, seeing as how they're not in a Neil Simon play. She laughs, picturing them living in a fifth-floor walkup and arguing over hummus.

"Do you like hummus?" she blurts out.

He casts a puzzled glance her way, his face clouded by an alcoholic haze. "Hummus?"

"Yeah. Hummus. Surely you've heard of it."

"I know what hummus is. I'm just not sure how it fits in."

She chews her lip, thinking. "Maybe it wasn't hummus. Maybe it was Greek bean soup."

"What are you talking about, CJ?"

CJ waves her hands vaguely, a grin on her face. Tonight she's a happy drunk. "Never mind." Somehow, she's not surprised that Toby doesn't know Neil Simon. Her head flops against the seat, and she sighs. "Remind me again where you're taking your honeymoon."

His forehead wrinkles and he answers, "Barbados. For three whole days."

Her grin turns crooked. "I'm surprised you're sacrificing three days."

"Andi wanted it." He shrugs, as if that explains everything. She supposes it does, but his fiancee's name sounds suspiciously like an accusation.

"Andi wanted Barbados, huh?" CJ always calls her whatever Toby does. For three years she called her Andrea. "You gonna wear a Speedo?"

Toby looks at her closely, the whites around his eyes flashing every time they go under a streetlight. "No," he answers simply, one brow drawn down.

She nods. "Good." Tonight, she's also a fuzzy drunk, and she spreads out in the taxi, knowing he won't care that she's encroaching on his personal space.

+++

They met when she was in her twenties at a crummy bar in Brooklyn. She used to editorialize under her breath even more back then, and she'd caught him laughing at her while she watched The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

"What?" she snapped. He kept laughing, and she continued, "Do _you_ think the Ayatollah could be intimidated by a guy who was in a movie with a monkey?" Which, of course, only made him laugh harder, because what else was there to do?

"No," he admitted, and from the way he was still laughing at her, she knew her opinion was ingenuous. "I've never heard it put quite like that, but it's true. In politics, you never live down your past." He smiled crookedly, and his teeth flashed white in a goatee that was ten years out of date. "I'm Toby."

She drained the last of the whiskey sour from her glass and chewed a piece of ice. "I had a golden retriever named Toby when I was a kid."

The thought sobered him up, and he said, "Wow, that's...not very flattering."

She grinned as she gathered her purse and jacket, tossing a five on the counter. As she walked past, she winked at him and picked the cherry off its stem with her teeth. "I think I like you better than my dog. He always barked when Carter came on the TV." And then she checked her watch and realized she was late, swearing under her breath as she hurried out of the bar. She forgot that she'd never given him her name, and wondered only later if he'd have asked for her number if she'd given him the chance.

It was two weeks later that they met again, at a party in a Harlem loft. She knew very few people in New York, but this painter she'd sat next to in English 101 had just opened his first gallery show, so who was she to pass up an invitation? And then she turned around from raiding Raul's refrigerator for beer and lemonade to find herself staring into Toby's astonished face.

"I never thought I'd see you again," were the first words out of his mouth.

She smiled at him, a genuine smile, and set the bottles she was holding on the counter. "Shandy?" she offered. "You'd think there'd be champagne, but no."

"Um, yeah, sure." As she mixed drinks, he scratched his head and cleared his throat. "Did you really have a dog named Toby?"

She threw her head back and laughed, almost spilling the beer. "I should apologize for that. I did have a dog named Toby, and normally I wouldn't tell someone they had the same name as my dog, but you know, a girl can never be too careful in a bar."

"No," he said, and it was an agreement. "For instance, she should never tell anyone her name."

Her smile this time was rueful as she handed him his drink. "Claudia, but no one calls me that. It's CJ." She took a long draught of her shandy and squared her shoulders. "So how do you know Raul?"

"I don't."

CJ's face paled only briefly. "Please don't tell me you've been following me the last two weeks."

"I go to the same synagogue as his girlfriend. She invited me tonight, under the misguided assumption that since I'm 'professorial,' in her words, I appreciate art."

"So why come?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe it was fate," he said, and the note of sarcasm was only slightly veiled.

"You mean, this moment will profoundly affect the rest of our lives?" she grinned.

He shrugged, and she shrugged, and after taking refuge on the fire escape they both agreed that Raul's paintings were awful, and art groupies were freaks. She liked him because he was cynical, and he liked her because she wasn't. He smiled at the impish look on her face when she suggested they ditch the party and escape down the fire escape, because "what's it for if not to escape?" He even bit his lip and refrained from commenting on the horrid grammar. So they left their plastic cups sitting on the grille, and since neither one had been comfortable enough to leave their personal effects inside, they climbed down three and a half flights on a rusted metal ladder.

They hailed a cab, and rode back to the same bar in Brooklyn, where CJ told him about finding her boyfriend in bed with their downstairs neighbor. "It really was a good thing, though, because I'd been offered this job out here that afternoon, and finding him in bed with her made the decision a lot easier."

Toby nodded and told her about the love of his life - the angel he'd adored all through college, who'd crushed his heart under her heel a few years ago, and how he'd never been the same since. Then he told her this was his favorite bar, and said something about all the gin joints in all the world, but she cut him off because, quite frankly, "I'm no Ingrid Bergman."

The hour grew late, and he offered to walk her back to her sub-let. Even though she smilingly told him, "I'm a big girl," she let him lead her out of the bar with the ghostly presence of his hand at her elbow. She was used to men being tactile with her, always a hand on her arm, or clasping her fingers, and his distance made her head buzz. Later, as they passed a jazz club where a pianist was slaughtering Dave Brubeck, she shivered when his arm wrapped around her, palm grazing her hip, and they danced in the shadows outside the door. A few blocks later she quietly told him, "The job's only for a couple of months. I'm just a PR intern," and it would have been apropos of nothing if they hadn't said so much in the silences that stretched between them.

He said good night at the door of her building, and when he hugged her, while his face was in her hair, she said, "Let's be friends always, Toby." And they saw one another each of the 107 days she stayed in New York, but they didn't spend the night together once. CJ, for one, didn't think she could handle the messy ending. Because, really, he was New York, and she was LA, and it never would have worked out anyway.

+++

She must have fallen asleep in the cab. She doesn't remember being sleepy, but suddenly she's blinking, and they're only twelve blocks from her condo, and Toby's hand is halfway between her knee and her thigh. It wouldn't feel so strange if her skirt wasn't hitched up so far, leaving nothing between skin-on-skin but a sheer layer of nylon.

She meets his eye languidly, then glances pointedly at her leg. He looks down, making a choking sound as he draws his hand away. CJ struggles to sit up, and he shakes his head. "It's possible I've had far too much to drink," he offers by way of explanation.

"I'm not going to be your one last fling," she tells him, pushing her hair out of her face.

His mouth is solemn but his eyes glitter as he responds, "It's also possible that you've had far too much to drink."

She snorts. "Not nearly enough for this conversation, Paul."

"Come again?"

She smiles. "And I'm Corie."

He pauses before an answering smile blooms on his face. "Barefoot in the Park."

"You _do_ know Neil Simon!” This also doesn't surprise her one bit, but her voice is delighted.

"Well, not personally. Is that what the hummus thing was about earlier?"

"It was Greek bean soup," she answers definitively, and they both laugh, because she's brilliant, and on a meteoric rise, and not normally this ludicrous.

He shakes his head at her, and as the cab rounds the last corner before her house, she falls into him, because she really has had far too much to drink tonight. His solid hands steady her, since he is used to riding in a cab. And it's not the first time they've been this close, and not the first time they've been this close to intimacy, but it is the first time he's been a week removed from marriage to another woman. Still, the air grows somehow denser as their eyes meet, as their breaths mingle. She can smell scotch and peanut sauce on his breath, and knows that his tongue would taste wonderful in her mouth.

Time fractures around them, slows almost to a standstill, and in that one frozen second, possibility stretches before them. Her heart lurches, and for a moment she's sure he's going to kiss her and they'll fall into bed together and change everything.

And for once in her life, she doesn't give a damn.

But the air is still dense, surrounding them, pushing them apart. Toby blinks, and time coalesces, and the moment is gone. The cab pulls into the parking lot of her complex, finds her address and stops, leaving them to blunder through paying the cabbie and climbing out of the backseat without falling all over each other.

+++

After she was back in California, after those 107 days were over, she cried over him for exactly fifteen minutes and 42 seconds. It seemed the thing to do. She'd cry big, messy tears for the men who broke her heart, but Toby managed to deserve more and less simultaneously. The first phone call was somehow more awkward than it should have been, but after they drifted into a cascade of remembered in-jokes it got easier, and they talked almost weekly. Sometimes they would write, when speaking was just too much. CJ talked Toby through a series of unhealthy love affairs, and he talked her down from whatever high horse she'd been riding. CJ had her unhealthy affairs, and Toby his high horses, but those would have been fruitless arguments.

She knew, without discussing it, that they'd never be able to have a casual affair; that if they started, it would be very serious, very fast. And besides being all wrong in all the difficult places, the timing was never right. So months turned into years, and one day over the phone, he started talking about a woman named Andrea, and there was something in his voice she'd never heard before. CJ really got very good at telling herself that she wasn't jealous.

So then, too many years later, there she was, standing in her kitchen with the phone to her ear, unable to fathom the idea that Toby was actually getting married. He wanted to come out the weekend before, spend it with her, and while she wasn't big on the idea of the Last Hurrah, she supposed that most men had bachelor parties. On the other hand, bachelor parties were for frat boys, and Toby had never been a frat boy. Instead, he wanted his weekend with CJ. He didn't say, 'his last weekend with CJ.'

So she hung up the phone, and changed the sheets on her guest bed five months too early, and started resigning herself to the idea of Toby, her friend and someone else's husband.

+++

She rubs her neck climbing the flight of stairs to her condo, and is pleased when his fingers replace hers as he follows her.

"I wouldn't have asked you to be. A fling," he whispers before she unlocks the door, and she nods, smiling tiredly. They leave their jackets tangled on the floor in a heap, and CJ goes to the kitchen to make green tea while Toby disappears into her guest bedroom. He emerges minutes later in flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. She's untucked her blouse, and kicked off her shoes, and peeled out of her pantyhose. They drink tea and murmur meaningless words until two in the morning, when they're both too tired to think.

She lays on her bed, still in her partially-dressed state, for half an hour before she gives up and shuffles to the door of the guest room. Toby didn't close the door, and he's slouched on the pillows, reading a novel with the bedside lamp on.

He glances up at the sound of her footsteps scuffling the carpet. "Hi." His smile is soft by lamplight.

"Hi," she responds, and because this really is her bed too, she goes and lays next to him in the guest room. "Couldn't sleep," she yawns.

"Yeah, well, that's what you get after that power nap in the cab." He sets his book aside, and lays down facing her. They say nothing for so long, she thinks maybe he's asleep.

But she takes his hand in hers anyway, and his eyes slide open. She pauses, willing away the confused lump in her throat. "Don't stop being Toby," she finally says.

His lips curl upward under his beard. "Never," he promises.

When she wakes up in the morning, her hand is still clasped in Toby's. She stretches, and he wakes at the movement. They smile at one another, and CJ thinks that at least they finally spent the night together, even if it's not quite how such a thing usually goes. But that's okay, because he's Toby, and she's CJ, and this is all so very _them_.

After all, he's New York, and she's LA, and it never would have worked anyway.


End file.
